The Guardian publish a weekly set of questions and answers on a variety of football minutiae at The Knowledge. Forutnately, some of these are extremely tractable using R, so I thought I’d have a go at working through the archives to see if I can shed light on any ... [Read more...]

Introduction As a follow-up to a previous post about correlations between Texas high school academic UIL competition scores and SAT/ACT scores, I wanted explore some of the “alternatives” to joining the two data sets—which come from different sources. In that post, I simply perform a an inner_join() ... [Read more...]

Did you know that you can run R and Python code within a SQL Server instance? Not only does this give you a powerful server to process your data science calculations, but it makes things faster by eliminating the need to move data between client and server. Best of all, ... [Read more...]

Using Text Mining on Open Ended Items Good survey design is both art and science. You have to think about how people will read and process your questions, and what sorts of responses might result from different question forms and wording. One of the big rules I follow in survey ... [Read more...]

The uRos2018 conference is aimed at professionals and academics who are involved in producing or consuming official (government) statistics. We are happy to announce that we recently posted the full program of the 6th international conference on the use of … Continue reading → [Read more...]

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Predicting the outcome of the different teams in the FIFA World Cup has been of great interest to the general public, and predicting the outcome has also attracted quite some attention in the R community. The World Cup has ended and by now, everyone knows that France managed to take ... [Read more...]

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Occasionally R might not be the tool you want to use (hard to believe, but apparently that happens). Then you may need to export some data from R via a csv file. When the data is stored as a ts object, the time index can easily get lost. So I ... [Read more...]

Predicting the outcome of the different teams in the FIFA World Cup has been of great interest to the general public, and predicting the outcome has also attracted quite some attention in the R community. The World Cup has ended and by now, everyone knows that France managed to take ... [Read more...]

While I understand the languages I need well enough, I don't know much about programming best practices. This goes from function naming to code organization, along with all the tools others created to manage projects (git, make, ctabs, etc.). For short scripts and blog posts, this is fine. Even for ... [Read more...]

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At the Insurance Data Science conference, both Eric Novik and Paul-Christian Bürkner emphasised in their talks the value of thinking about the data generating process when building Bayesian statistical models. It is also a key step in Michael Betancourt’s Principled Bayesian Workflow. In this post, I will discuss ... [Read more...]

In my mini-course, “5 Things Excel Users Should Know About R,” the fifth is more a point of encouragement than advice: don’t panic!  (To learn about the other four, why not enroll for the mini-course yourself? It’s free.) There are numerous places to get stuck in R, many of ... [Read more...]

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The August 2018 issue of Significance Magazine includes a retrospective feature on the R language. (I suggest reading the PDF version, also available for free access.) The article by Nick Thieme looks back at the 25 years since the R language was first conceived at Auckland University in 1992. It follows the history ... [Read more...]

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